Volume 35, Number 14 · September 29, 1988
Playing to Win
By Jasper Griffin
The Archaeology of the Olympics: The Olympics and Other Festivals in Antiquity
edited by Wendy J. Raschke
University of Wisconsin Press, 297 pp., $17.95 (paper)
Greek Athletics and the Genesis of Sport
by David Sansone
University of California Press, 136 pp., $19.95
The revival of the Olympic games is a remarkable example of the vitality of classical antiquity, and illustrates their inexhaustible capacity for presenting a different appearance to each successive generation. It was, for instance, obvious to nineteenth-century Englishmen, and to Anglophile Americans and Frenchmen like Baron Pierre de Coubertin, that the great athletic festivals of Greece must have been like the sporting occasions of British public schools. They must have been strictly amateur affairs, the ban on prize money excluding those whom the American sportswriter Caspar Whitney liked to call 'the great unwashed' and reserving the games for the 'better element.' Writers of books duly echoed the dogma, and the amateur sportsman of the recent past was largely created by a false view of the sporting ethics of ancient Greece.
Review, 3971 words
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